Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!watcgl!lrbartram
From: lrbartram@watcgl.waterloo.edu (lyn bartram)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.misc
Subject: Re: pie menus
Message-ID: <3758@watcgl.waterloo.edu>
Date: 28 Mar 88 16:50:32 GMT
References: <5104@sigi.Colorado.EDU>
Reply-To: lrbartram@watcgl.waterloo.edu (lyn bartram)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 19

In article <5104@sigi.Colorado.EDU> andreas@sigi.Colorado.EDU (Andreas C. Lemke) writes:
>I've heard of a (new) kind of menus in which items are arranged like a
>pie chart.  The menu pops up with the mouse cursor in the center so
>that each item can be reached by moving the mouse in the corresponding
>direction.  
>Do pie menus exist?  On which system?  How are labels arranged?  Are
>they really better than linear menus?  Is it more difficult (slower) for a
>*novice* to find an item in such a circular arrangement?

	I have seen work done using pie menus and variations on such for a
while.  Ben Schneiderman of the University of Maryland has done work in this
field.  In our own lab at the University of Waterloo, several applications
use hexagonal menus and pie menus - specifically paint programs and
3D modelling applications.  From a designer's point of view, they facilitate
the provision of nested menu levels: from the user's point of view, they
provide a "relative" motor memory demand (direction of menu selection) rather
than an "absolute" requirement (location of menu item on screen).  This 
is asserted to have much less cognitive overload ( there are references for
this assertion, but i don't have them on hand. )